Keep laptop or sell?

Kegan

Kegan

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I'm trying to decide whether or not to sell my laptop. I have it hooked up to a 20" widescreen monitor, keyboard, mouse and external hard drive. This thing pretty much never leaves its spot on my desk. It's a Macbook Pro - 2ghz, 2gigs of RAM, 80gb HD and is one of the most reliable machines I've ever used.

The only problem is however, is that I recently got my A1 and editing HDV footage on it is HELL. I have no trouble capturing, but playback is jerky and as if frames are skipping. I've tried the "ProRes fix" to no avail and I've never seen this problem before. I've put it on my internal hard drive as well, in case it was a problem with my external.

I've come to the conclusion that I'm just going to get a beefy tower, but I'm debating selling the laptop or not. I've read many posts about people using it on set and the laptop being very handy, but considering I've never really moved it, except for a couple trips (and even that was only to check emails) I'm starting to think I don't need it. I know it seems pretty obvious, but I'm just trying to see if in a few months, I'll regret it for some reason (maybe some crazy new program that would make my laptop fantastic to keep with me on set).

Thoughts?

Kegan
 
Unless by "sell" you mean give it to me for free, then I really can't help. Haha. :beer:

But seriously, what it comes down to is 1) Will you use it? and 2) How much $ could you get (i.e. is it worth it?) Best of luck to ya!
 
I couldn't live without a laptop. I edited most of an hour and half 5 camera concert shoot and a music video with bonus footage sitting in the back corner of a local coffee shop. I also did all the DVD menus and whatnot while I guzzled coffee there. For me I like a change of scenery instead of spending 8 hours at the same freakin' desk.....
I'm only shooting standard DV footage and I'm on a MBP dual 2.4 with 2g ram and don't have any issues. I guess that's another reason for me to not make the jump to HD....... though my inner excuse maker would love an A1.
 
I'm still using my Powerbook g4 1.67ghz. It works fantastic for HD... But that's dvcpro HD.

I'm not upgrading my laptop anytime soon. New laptop architecture seems to be on the way in the very near future (June?), and since I want a major upgrade to my current laptop, I'm certainly waiting for a Blu-ray, Prores 4:2:2 capable laptop that can outperform my dual 2.7ghz g5 workstation.
 
I'd say do some reasearch about Macbook Pro's and HDV editing. Maybe you just need more RAM? I know DVCPRO HD is a lot better for editing as you can edit on a lot older machines on it with no problem whatsoever.
The setup you have seems like it should be able to handle HDV. Is your harddrive maxed out?
Or maybe getting a newer macbook pro, which has better graphics cards is the answer.
 
I personally cant live without a laptop. So nice to work where you want and not be confined to a desk all of the time. That said, if yours spends most of its time docked, I'd sell and get a more powerful desktop.
 
Hmm, maybe I'm jumping to conclusions. When running FCS2, my CPU usage hovers around 23% and my RAM isn't even using half of it. It has to be bottlenecking somewhere else. My hard drive has around 13 gigs free out of 80, so what I think I'll do is a clean install of OSX, re-install FCP and try this whole thing again.

I'll try and post back the results,

Kegan
 
I'm sure someone else on here (or some A-1 forums) has to have the same setup as yours. They could help.
 
Do you have the 7200rpm hard drive? If not you might want to invest in a USB or Firewire External Hard Drive thats 7200 rpm...

On my old Sony Vaio 1.7GHz centrino i can edit using vegas but only if i am connected to an external drive because the internal is to slow to enable playback.

Now i edit with a MacBook Pro 2.6Ghz Core 2 Duo with the 7200 rpm Drive and can edit all day on the internal drive.
Though i am using a external 1 TB drive since HD files are so large i cant fit a whole project on the internal drive.
 
Most folks feel Firewire drives are better for editing, so I would try an external 7200 rpm Firewire drive rather than a 7200 rpm USB drive. An esata drive through an esata express card adaptor would work also.
 
I totally didn't see he was editing on external hd, I could see that being a problem if it's a slow drive and or connected via usb.
And yes, firewire 400 is better to edit with (and in general) than usb 2.0, since it's a constant speed, not variable like usb 2.0.
And of course firewire 800 is even better than both.
 
I'm with everyone else. There has to be a problem. That machine should handle that with no problem. Unless you are using multiple HDV streams from that drive it should run with no issue.

I have seen before where some Windows machines view the drive as a USB1.0 drive vs a 2.0 drive, and transfer the data very slowly. Not sure if that happens with the Macs or not, but that could explain the problem.
 
Well, I am using a G-Tech 250gig, 7200rpm drive via FW400. I was using a USB drive at the time, but...well, let's just say it kinda "hit a wall".

I bought another 500gig G-Tech hard drive and will do a complete re-format/install tonight. I'm hoping this will fix the problem.

-Kegan

*-If anyone has any other suggestions, that'd be great! I posted in the FCP forum, but didn't really get much advice there. Thanks again guys.
 
So when you were having the problems, you were using usb drive or usb 2.0 connection? Have you checked to see if it runs slow using the firewire drive?
 
I had some problems with the USB drive, but it wasn't the problems I'm currently having. I just installed Leopard (which by the way is really cool) and I'm going to start installing my programs and post my results back. The firewire drive never gave me any problems, but Final Cut is with this jerky playback.

No anti-virus software at all either.

-Kegan
 
Maybe try changing a few things in system settings.
System settings>Playback Control> put RT at "safe", if it hasn't been already.
 
Yep, I changed all those settings and zip, zero, nada. Didn't make a difference at all. If I could find my FCP discs, that would help..

-Kegan
 
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